Did my mother bear me as a monstrosity in men’s eyes? My life and fortunes are a monstrosity, partly because of Hera, partly because of my beauty. I wish I had been wiped clean like a painting and made plain instead of beautiful …
EURIPIDES, Helen1
THE PICTURE HOMER PAINTS OF HELEN IN TROY is a poignant and lonely one; he hints that these were ten long years of self-recrimination. Helen calls herself a vicious, scheming bitch and wishes she had been swept away by a storm before causing so much unhappiness.2 In her funeral speech for Hector – the last great oration of the Iliad – she talks about her ‘doom-struck, harrowed heart’, and wishes a premature death had pre-empted her meeting with Paris ‘as magnificent as a god’. Four times in Homer she refers to herself as a kuōn, ‘a bitch’.3 The Greek word was chosen carefully: those who listened to the rhapsodes would have remembered the scavenger-beasts that gnawed at human flesh. And like the dogs that prowled (and still prowl) around the walls of Troy, Helen too was half a part of the city, half an exile.
Starving, cut off from their millennia-long links with the sea by the line of Greek ships on Be¸sik Bay, even despite her beauty, by the end of the war the Trojans have come to hate Helen. They shudder as she passes – whispering and turning away. We cannot tell how quickly her own doubts set in, when she realises what she has started. The moment the flirtation was consummated on Kranai? Or when Paris loses his gloss and the first flush of the affair is over? What Homer seems to suggest is that pretty soon the scales fall from Helen’s eyes and she realises what a peacock Paris is. He has become ‘blind, mad Paris’. Talking to Paris’ brother, Hector, flirting masterfully, she opines: ‘I wish I had been the wife of a better man, someone alive to outrage, the withering scorn of men.’4 And once the eldest-born prince of Troy has been killed by Achilles, leading the songs of sorrow Helen keens:5
And so in the same breath I mourn for you and me, my doom-struck, harrowed heart! Now there is no one left in the wide realm of Troy, no friend to treat me kindly – all the countrymen cringe from me in loathing!6
Helen’s relationship with men in the Iliad sets her up to be a fickle woman,7 but it is with the advent of the Trojan Horse that she is unambiguously established as an archetype of duplicity.8 The Trojan Horse is mentioned only once in the Odyssey and does not feature at all in the Iliad; the fullest account of it is given by Virgil in the Aeneid. The earlier poem terminates with the death of Hector before Troy is sacked; however, with the help of Greek vase paintings, plays, and the snatches of lost epics that resurface in later works of antiquity, we can see the drama to its conclusion.
We hear how the Greeks, demoralised and weak after ten years of campaigning, ten years of camping out, both summer and winter, have put all their faith in a lunatic, brilliant gambit from the master-mind of Odysseus. The Greeks hide close by at Tenedos and burn their camp – at last, it seems, they have relinquished Helen. The one thing that still stands outside the walls of Troy is a giant wooden horse. The Trojans are divided: should they throw this brute creation over a cliff, or would that be sacrilegious – is the horse a gift for their beloved goddess Athena? Tired, gullible, quixotic and superstitious, they decide to welcome the horse in. The people of Troy celebrate with flowers and sacrifices. Helen, Virgil adds, runs like a bacchante around the town, dancing with intemperance – delighting now that Troy will soon be destroyed.9
But whose side is she on? Helen is also bait, endeavouring to tempt her onetime countrymen out to certain death. Circling the horse three times, stroking its flanks as she walks, she imitates the voices of the women the Greeks have left behind at home – murmuring sweet nothings, torturing the men inside with the memory of their loved ones.10 One hero, Anticlus, is so desperate to leave, so tempted by her siren song, that Odysseus has to kill him before he betrays the crack squad inside. For once, though, Helen’s charms are not strong enough. The Greek soldiers hidden inside – any number from thirteen to three thousand, so the storytellers said – sit tight.11 As the moon rises, one Greek, Sinon, slips out of the horse and lights a beacon to tell Agamemnon’s forces waiting patiently at Tenedos that the ruse has succeeded. The Sack of Troy can begin.
As the Greeks break into the citadel there are manifold atrocities. Paris’ sister Cassandra is raped by Ajax. Hector’s young son Astyanax is either thrown over the walls or used as a human club with which to beat old King Priam to death.12 On one of the earliest visual representations of the story, a vase dating to 700 BC, now standing alone in the British Museum, children lie bleeding, stabbed by warriors with thick swords.13 The women of Troy are left to watch the homicide, and to wait for their own degradation and agonies.
Extant legislation from the 13th century BC makes it clear that enslavement, often following a military campaign, brought with it deplorable adversity:
A slave who provokes the anger of his master will either be killed or have his nose, eyes or ears mutilated; or his master will call him to account along with his wife, his children, his brother, his sister, his in-laws, his family, whether it be a male or female slave … If ever he is to die, he will not die alone; his family will be included with him.14
The moment of subjugation is hauntingly, shockingly described by Euripides in his play The Trojan Women. Troy has been torched. The sad, certain violation of shrines and homes and lives is described by the chorus. The cycle of violence will be unbroken. The soldiers will make their captives suffer because they too have suffered. The women, maimed and petrified, press together. Written during the time of the Peloponnesian War, the twenty-seven-year-long struggle between Athens and its rival Sparta,15 The Trojan Women also had political overtones. The play tells the story of Helen and of Troy, but it was too an exploration of the privations and furies of military conflict. Euripides’ audience was being asked to confront the lot not of conflict’s victors, but of its victims.
The sometimes cocky Athenian audience must have shuddered as they watched. A hallmark of the ongoing Peloponnesian War had been the hideous brutality meted out by both sides: both had razed cities to the ground (the worst instances were at Plataea by the Spartans in 42716 and on Melos in 41617 by the Athenians) and massacred their men, selling the women and children into slavery. The actors spoke their lines with the very real spectre of military, moral and psychological collapse hovering in the wings.
The playwright Aeschylus also knew how dreadfully perfect this cycle of violence could be. ‘They raped our queen, we raped their city, and we were right …’18 The ingredients of his play – sexual politics, civic identity, abstract universals and military strategy – were already seething; to add Helen was to throw fat on the fire. Because she was, of course, not just Helen, she was Helen of Sparta. In the eyes of Athens, at war with Sparta, this libertine queen was both their political and moral enemy.
Bronze Age texts tell us that enormous numbers of men and women ended up as the spoils of war in the 13th century BC. In Hittite texts, these are known as ‘booty-people’. On Linear B tablets from Pylos and Thebes which described human commodities are etched the names Tros and Troia – Trojan and Trojan women.19 In a world where all depended on manpower, wars were started to appropriate not just territories but peoples. One Hittite king, Mursili II, boasts that following a particularly successful campaign he herded 15,000 newly conquered captives back to his city.20 It is no surprise that these atrocities were burned into the consciousness, into the popular mythology of the Eastern Mediterranean – and telling that a woman’s lust should be remembered as their aboriginal spark.
And what of Paris? Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey graces his death with a single line. We hear from the Little Iliad that he is killed by an arrow – by the archaic period a weapon considered to be effeminate and unheroic.21 It is a sufficiently ignominious end for a man without honour,22 a pretty, eviscerated prince who, unlike Helen, amounted to little more than moonshine. And once he has gone, Helen, with unseemly haste, takes on another prince of Troy, Deiphobus.23 Learning that the Greeks are inside the city, Helen steals her new husband’s sword and leaves him to the mercy of Menelaus and Odysseus.24 It is a final act of treachery dwelt on with perverse delight by Virgil in Book 6 of the Aeneid. The hero Aeneas is travelling through the underworld, where the Spartan queen’s perfidy is revealed to him:
Here too he [Aeneas] saw Deiphobus, son of Priam, his whole body mutilated and his face cruelly torn. The face and both hands were in shreds. The ears had been ripped from the head. He was noseless and hideous. Aeneas, barely recognising him … went up to him and spoke … ‘Deiphobus, mighty warrior, descended from the noble blood of Teucer, who could have wished to inflict such a punishment upon you? …’ To this the son of Priam answered … ‘It is my own destiny and the crimes of the murdered from Sparta that brought me to this. These are reminders of Helen.’25
As the fires of Troy-town blaze, Helen is tearing through the streets, desperate to find sanctuary. She is surrounded by hatred: Stesichorus tells us that the Greeks and Trojans gather to stone her to death.26When Menelaus finally roots her out, cowering in a temple (ancient authors dispute whether the temple was consecrated to Athena, Apollo or Aphrodite) his sword is aloft, ready to kill.
But, so the ancients recounted, the fires of lust proved stronger than the fires of revenge. Menelaus drops his sword.27 Electra wails: ‘O misery me! Have their swords lost their edge in the face of that beauty?’28 The scene is vividly recreated on vases across the classical world. Although Menelaus has the perfect opportunity to slice Helen open, the perfect excuse to run her through, he does not do it. He loves her instead, and because of this she is both exciting and terrible. She tricks men into ‘sheathing their swords’ with the promise of perfect sex.29 Even presented with his specious, disgraced queen, trapped in a corner in front of him, Menelaus cannot dominate. She is a woman to remember, a woman who is sexual but not subservient, and because of this she is a warning to history.
One of the earliest surviving images of Helen is on a giant pithos discovered by chance by a smallholder on the island of Mykonos.30 This fabulous 7th-century BC piece is now displayed in the Archaeological Museum on the island. The surface is a press of images. Menelaus threatens Helen with a gargantuan blade – the metal shaft must be a good 4 feet long. All around her there are terrible scenes: soldiers dying, women and children being killed. But Helen does not flinch. She simply pulls her veil around her head, an action that is continually repeated in the representations of her discovery. It is hard to tell whether the Spartan queen is loosening her veil or wrap-ping it tighter around her. The gesture is common in Greek art and can be interpreted in three ways. Sometimes it is a fearful reaction: the woman hides her face when she is afraid. Sometimes it signifies marriage: maybe Helen is welcoming back her lawful husband. And some suggest it is an erotic ploy, a way of letting slip her clothes to hint at pleasures to come, teasing Menelaus with a peep of her famous breasts.31
‘When Menelaos caught a glimpse of Helen’s breasts – naked in whatever way – he threw away his sword,’32 recites one character in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata; and in Euripides’ Andromache, Menelaus is berated: ‘casting sheep’s eyes on her bosom, you unbuckled your sword and puckered up for kisses, petting that traitorous bitch.’33
On a number of the artefacts that depict Helen’s recapture by the King of Sparta, she has wild, distrait hair; on one mirror, delicately etched by the Etruscans using the tang technique, Menelaus’ fingers are meshed through Helen’s curls, dragging her away from the image of Athena to which she clings.34 Elsewhere, though, a tender Menelaus respectfully leads her by the hand to his waiting ship. A bronze shield-band from Sparta itself (almost certainly) shows Menelaus with sword aloft looking back at a Helen who carries a wreath – there is no threat here.35 But even though he takes her home, the majority of depictions make it clear that Helen’s actions will be neither forgiven nor forgotten.
In Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon, beacon fires are lit to bring the news of the defeat of the Trojans to the Greeks. The archaeologist Dr Elizabeth French (who has spent many years working in the Aegean landscape) estimates that the Mycenaean citadels were so well placed that Greeks on either side of the Bosphorus could indeed have watched as the beacons were torched first from Mount Ida in Turkey, then on Lemnos, Mount Athos, Cithairon and finally at Mycenae’s own watchtower, Agios Elias in the Arachneion range that cradles the great citadel above the Argive plain.36 The fires signalled the fall of Troy, they told of a Greek triumph, and they announced that the Spartan queen would be coming back home.
I
Hot through Troy’s ruin Menelaus broke
To Priam’s palace, sword in hand, to sate
On that adulterous whore a ten years’ hate
And a king’s honour. Through red death, and smoke,
And cries, and then by quieter ways he strode,
Till the still innermost chamber fronted him.
He swung his sword, and crashed into the dim
Luxurious bower, flaming like a god.
High sat white Helen, lonely and serene.
He had not remembered that she was so fair,
And that her neck curved down in such a way;
And he felt tired. He hung the sword away,
And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there,
The perfect Knight before the perfect Queen.
II
So far the poet. How should he behold
That journey home, the long connubial years?
He does not tell you how white Helen bears
Child on legitimate child, becomes a scold, Haggard with virtue. Menelaus bold Waxed garrulous, and sacked a hundred Troys ’Twixt noon and supper. And her golden voice Got shrill as he grew deafer. And both were old.
Often he wonders why on earth he went Troyward, or why poor Paris ever came. Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent; Her dry shanks twitch at Paris’ mumbled name. So Menelaus nagged; and Helen cried; And Paris slept on by Scamander side.
RUPERT BROOKE, ‘Menelaus and Helen’37